This fresh declaration from North Korea bears little resemblance to the expected fruits of the engaged, effective diplomacy that was supposed to be personally conducted by a charismatic president whose heart was big, but whose brain was even bigger.

In doing so, "our first measure must be sustained, direct, and aggressive diplomacy — the kind that the Bush administration has been unable and unwilling to use."

Nearly six years after than smug assurance, the new generation of the cultish dynastic dictatorship in Pyongyang unabashedly announces: "We are not disguising the fact that the various satellites and long-range rockets that we will fire and the high-level nuclear test we will carry out are targeted at the United States."

As the London Telegraph reports, thanks to Google Earth, we now have incontrovertible evidence of North Korea's gulag system that holds as many as 200,000 "for anything deemed to be critical of the regime," and whose occupants "survive by eating rats and picking corn kernels out of animal waste."

You would think such realities would place North Korea at the top of Obama's priorities. After all, he went to Cairo in 2009 and condemned rulers who are "ruthless in suppressing the rights of others" — and the audience knew very well he was referring to U.S. ally President Mubarak. Within a year and a half of that speech, Mubarak was deposed in an "Arab Spring" that unleashed a sleeping giant of America-hating Islamism.

But Mubarak was not as oppressive as North Korea's Kim Jong-Un, or his tyrannical father and grandfather.

Instead of despots running to the negotiating table to grab the various carrots Obama would wave at them, the president's foreign policy lost Egypt as an ally and has allowed Islamofascist Iran to get dangerously near the nuclear club. Tehran regards our sanctions as their camels do the desert flies — annoying but tolerable.

It was, in fact, cowboy Bush who got something out of Pyongyang, which during the six-party talks in 2007 agreed to shut its nuclear facilities in exchange for fuel.

But less than three months after Obama became president, obviously sensing new U.S. weakness, North Korea pulled out of talks, resumed nuclear enrichment and threw out the nuclear inspectors.

Before Obama, America showed strength to the world. Now we're folding in Afghanistan and Iraq, crossing our fingers on Iran, abandoning allies, and inviting hostile forces to take advantage of a not-so-superpower in decline.

Not-So-Superpower: The flare-up in North Korea is a reminder that the U.S. is no longer effectively diffusing hostile world trends. From Pyongyang to Tehran, America has become a hapless bystander.

'Settling accounts with the U.S. must be done with force, not with words, as it regards jungle law as the rule of its survival."

This fresh declaration from North Korea bears little resemblance to the expected fruits of the engaged, effective diplomacy that was supposed to be personally conducted by a charismatic president whose heart was big, but whose brain was even bigger.

In doing so, "our first measure must be sustained, direct, and aggressive diplomacy — the kind that the Bush administration has been unable and unwilling to use."

Nearly six years after than smug assurance, the new generation of the cultish dynastic dictatorship in Pyongyang unabashedly announces: "We are not disguising the fact that the various satellites and long-range rockets that we will fire and the high-level nuclear test we will carry out are targeted at the United States."

As the London Telegraph reports, thanks to Google Earth, we now have incontrovertible evidence of North Korea's gulag system that holds as many as 200,000 "for anything deemed to be critical of the regime," and whose occupants "survive by eating rats and picking corn kernels out of animal waste."

You would think such realities would place North Korea at the top of Obama's priorities. After all, he went to Cairo in 2009 and condemned rulers who are "ruthless in suppressing the rights of others" — and the audience knew very well he was referring to U.S. ally President Mubarak. Within a year and a half of that speech, Mubarak was deposed in an "Arab Spring" that unleashed a sleeping giant of America-hating Islamism.

But Mubarak was not as oppressive as North Korea's Kim Jong-Un, or his tyrannical father and grandfather.

Instead of despots running to the negotiating table to grab the various carrots Obama would wave at them, the president's foreign policy lost Egypt as an ally and has allowed Islamofascist Iran to get dangerously near the nuclear club. Tehran regards our sanctions as their camels do the desert flies — annoying but tolerable.

It was, in fact, cowboy Bush who got something out of Pyongyang, which during the six-party talks in 2007 agreed to shut its nuclear facilities in exchange for fuel.

But less than three months after Obama became president, obviously sensing new U.S. weakness, North Korea pulled out of talks, resumed nuclear enrichment and threw out the nuclear inspectors.

Before Obama, America showed strength to the world. Now we're folding in Afghanistan and Iraq, crossing our fingers on Iran, abandoning allies, and inviting hostile forces to take advantage of a not-so-superpower in decline.

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